FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT NEW CHINA NEWS AGENCY - PAGE 4

A former cotton mill worker convicted in a string of bombings that killed 108 people in northern China was executed Sunday along with two people who sold him explosives, according to the official New China news agency. Jin Ruchao's execution came after the Higher People's Court of Hebei province rejected his appeal. The two others had supplied Jin with ammonia nitrate. A fourth man, accused of selling Jin 50 detonators and 20 fuses, was set to be executed, but the court suspended the ruling for two years.

China is modernizing its navy so it can project power farther out to sea, but it still has much ground to cover to catch up with the United States, a navy commander said. Commander Shi Yunsheng's comments, carried by China's official news agency, came in an interview marking Friday's 50th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army's naval forces. Shi said the new generation of ships and weapons will allow China to intercept invaders in the open ocean and not close to shore, as China's navy was limited to doing in the past.

China's threat to censor foreign economic news and punish those who "jeopardize or slander the national interest" may be no more than a scare campaign, Western communications experts said Wednesday. With at least a dozen satellites beaming data into China and hundreds of networks and pressure groups sending information on fax machines, the authorities would find it impossible to monitor or stem the data flow, the experts said. Satellite and computer technology are within the grasp of millions of Chinese, eager for information and an electronic peek at the outside world.

The man in charge of reducing China's army by 1 million troops says the job is going smoothly and nearly one-fourth of all staff-level administrative positions have been eliminated. Yang Dezhi, chief of the general staff for the People's Liberation Army, told the New China News Agency that more than 100,000 troops will be demobilized and given new jobs before the end of the year. "The first batch of demobilized officers (already) have been assigned civilian jobs in various localities," the news agency quoted Yang as saying in a dispatch late Sunday.

Mikhail Gorbachev's comeback rated only three paragraphs from the official New China news agency, and not a single Chinese newspaper dared to defy a government ban on reports of his ouster or return to power. In a laconic announcement 12 hours after the fact, wedged between reports on Premier Li Peng's "cordial talks" with a Peruvian minister and new statistics on industrial growth, the news agency informed 1.2 billion Chinese that Gorbachev was reported to be "back in control."

Chinese officials say the nation's worst flooding in 40 years, caused by a fast-swelling Yangtze River, now threatens to overwhelm several large cities in the central part of the country. The army is evacuating more than a half-million people from an area in Hubei Province, state news organizations reported Saturday. They said increasingly desperate officials there might have to blow up several dikes and deliberately inundate millions of acres of farmland to divert water that endangers larger cities downstream.

The government said Saturday it had ordered the expulsion from China of a Hong Kong journalist who has been detained for a week on charges she offered bribes in exchange for secret documents. The journalist, Leung Wai-min, a 32, a reporter for The Hong Kong Express newspaper, was detained in the early hours of Oct. 25 and kept incommunicado. She was not allowed visits from her husband or editor or from British Embassy officials. China said that Leung would be forced to leave "within a limited period of time" but there was no indication she had been released.

With Tibet emerging as a potentially serious obstacle in U.S.-China relations, Beijing issued a tartly worded attack Sunday on a congressman who recently traveled to Tibet and accused Chinese authorities of strangling traditional culture. In a long statement from the New China News Agency, a senior official from Tibet accused the congressman, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), of trying to stir up trouble and lie about conditions in Tibet. Wolf, who traveled to Tibet Aug. 9-13 as a tourist without telling the authorities he was a congressman, said in Washington last week that he saw evidence of religious persecution and the obliteration of Tibetan culture and language by an influx of Chinese traders and merchants.

Summer floods and landslides have killed at least 121 people in southeastern China, and soldiers have been rushed to rescue 200,000 others stranded by the deluge, the government said Thursday. The twin calamities have forced nearly 450,000 people from their homes and caused more than $1.2 billion in damage in the southeastern provinces of Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Jiangsu and the southwestern province of Guizhou, the Civil Affairs Ministry in Beijing said. It urged that international and domestic relief aid be sent immediately to the stricken areas.